


Phobos

by orphan_account



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Aliens, Blood, Gen, Gore, Injury, Other, Phobias, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Whump, rick has seen some SHIT
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 16:04:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14897687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Rick Sanchez has several unusual fears. He didn't pick them up for no reason.this is basically a collection of traumatic shit ricks been through to justify fears like "pirates" and "wicker furniture"





	Phobos

The alien's stringy appendage contained an impressive amount of force as it pressed him into the web. He didn't kick quite fast enough, and now both his legs were tied up in into the hard, woven structure behind him. He struggled.

"Motherfu-" Rick was cut off into muffled shouting as the substance of the web covered his face as well. The creature moved one of its limbs from his chest to his free arm, just in time to prevent him access to a gun beneath his coat. And then that too was pinned.

He was defenseless. A sitting duck. He stared up into the creatures four wide eyes with his own dangerously narrowed ones. Rick had no idea whether the alien picked up on his message to it, spelling out its death. He didn't know if the creature had a scrap of sentience. In the absence of space to spit curses out loud, Rick resumed cursing himself out in his head.

_You're a fucking idiot. You escape death countless times from armed, trained warriors of the Galactic Federation, only to meet your downfall at the hand of an overgrown bug with the intelligence of a cardboard box._

_Don't fucking panic. You know better than that._

The material entrapping him came in long, thin lines. It was like the fiber of a rope - easily snappable, but once woven into an intricate pattern such as the one he was stuck to, it became near impenetrable. The string was somehow malleable to the alien, but to him, it only jabbed painfully into his skin, refusing to relent to him any space to breathe.

The sensation got worse as the restraints piled up around his chest, then his throat. His breaths came only from short inhales through his nose, though he wasted it all screaming mad, muffled threats at the thing. He found himself regretting it once that too was covered, and his noises were cut off in an abrupt wheeze.

Instinctively, he squeezed his eyes shut as the thread ran over them, and then his entire body was encased.

He fought his eyelids open again and found he could still see through the holes in the web. The lack of oxygen almost gave the illusion of quiet, possibly due to how as time passed the blood in his ears pounded louder. He couldn't see the alien anymore, and his head was stuck in place. The cavern ceiling loomed ominously above them, and he hoped desperately for it to be big enough that Birdperson would consider it a possibility for his location.

The wicker all around was pressing painfully into him, and as the number of layers grew, the pressure did the same. He felt his chest spasm painfully. He had a limited amount of time to make this work, and the burning he was beginning to feel in his lungs helped nothing.

Beneath the restraints, Rick tugged and pulled his arm towards his body, reaching for the closest gun in his jacket pocket. The last holes above his face closed up, and he was rendered completely senseless, encased now in a dark, tight cage, sweltering from his own body heat.

His arm didn't even budge.

Above him, he could barely hear through the rush of blood the sudden absence of sound. The alien was still. His panicked, suffocating mind was slow on the uptake.

_Why did it sto..._

_Oh._

The searing pain became the only thing to fill his mind as fangs dug deep into his side and _yanked._ He could feel part of his small intestine punctured through. As the bug pulled away, it's fang caught briefly on his rib if the sudden agonizing tug was anything to go by. Something cracked. Dimly, Rick realized he was screaming.

_Nice. Gonna die screaming pathetically, eaten alive by an overgrown bug encased in fucking wicker furniture. What a way to go. Shame you were never into vore._

_But if you're screaming..._

The bite had caused the cable to loosen around him. At least he could breathe, but there was a somewhat more pressing matter in that a spider was. Ha. Eating him out.

Rick was lucky he was the smartest man alive. Lucky that even bleeding out with a pretty severe case of gastrointestinal perforation, his brain made the connection from loosened bonds to access to gun to _kill, escape._

Then his arm actually was moving, numbly and sporadically shoving through the thick encasing of wicker to the gun in his pocket. The ties fell off and to the floor, even as he shakily pulled the trigger.

The alien screeched and flailed, one of its stringy appendages stabbing solidly into his gaping hole of a side. The momentary numb calm of having a set goal and destination resolved again into screaming, ringing pain. Then he was falling.

He crashed limply to the cavern ground, atop a pile of broken spindly restraints. The creature, clearly having spastically clung to the remaining web upon its demise, eventually collapsed beside him with a resounding thump.

Everything went quiet, besides the repeating plop of water droplets somewhere in the distance.

His ears started ringing.

Rick stared at the string before him numbly, and it wavered in and out of focus. The pile beneath him stabbed into his wrecked side.

_You have... to move... get out..._

Rick didn't have his portal gun. He'd gifted it temporarily to Birdperson. He mentally cursed himself out yet again for the unlucky choice, and his vision rose up to the giant caves small opening. The sliver of deep yellow light was halfway between the ominously looming distant ceiling and the broken floor upon which he resided - about level with where he'd been trapped before falling. Not a single gun in his current arsenal was capable of any kind of cauterization - they all contained purotonium, and were unstable enough to instantly kill him if he purposely fired on himself.

All except...

He had a flare gun.

Brought somewhere closer to awareness by the thought, Rick suddenly fumbled again for the pockets in his jacket.

_Flare gun. Flare gun. Flare gun._

His hand closed around the familiar grip, and he lifted the small black weapon out of his coat. Apparently, it had been close enough to his injury that his hand drew away wet, sticky, and tinted slightly red. He didn't look down. instead, he aimed the muzzle up and outstretched his arm.

His arm shook, spazzed, and fell back to his side. He aimed it again, and couldn't keep it still for a moment. The next time he brought the weapon down, it was with a scream of fury that quickly dissolved into a pained groan and had him curling up around his damaged side.

He willed his body to let go of its building tension and desperately hoped that he wasn't shaking.

He tried again, and couldn't even raise the gun high enough.

"Shit," he croaked, out loud. The gun wasn't built to contain multiple flares, he had one shot, and he would never make it this way. He performed a mental rundown of every device he could think of on his body at the moment and came up with not a single mechanism that could provide any form communication or distress beacon.

He had an idea, but with the way his side kept seizing like it hadn't ever been released from the dumb creature's maw, he was willing to wait a bit longer in the hopes that he wouldn't need to go through with it.

So he waited.

And waited.

...And waited.

The disturbed bits of wicker settled around him, still poking him uncomfortably. He distantly noticed that pieces of it were still woven neatly together, and took a moment to acknowledge how bizarrely perfect and appealing the pattern was. Weaving was surely a unique skill for an alien to possess. He wasn't even sure how it produced the material it used in the first place, everything had happened too quick for him to see. Water continued to drip.

He then distantly noticed his vision was darkening. In some instinctual urge to evade death, he abruptly lifted himself up on his arms.

The pain peaked violently, and his arms shook immediately under the strain. But he didn't relent.

He wasn't gonna die here.

Instead, he took one arm and stretched it out in front of him. He gripped the ground. The sudden clarity delivered from his initial movement momentarily faded in a wave of nauseous dizziness, but he threw his other arm ahead anyway and agonizingly dragged the rest of his body forward. He repeated the motion again and felt something stab sharply into his wound. He let out an involuntarily pained moan. That was definitely gonna be... Really infected. He could deal with that when he got back to the ship, though. And he was going to.

 

Crawling was slow work. Every motion pulled at his side, but he refused to look down at it. And even if he did stop to assess the damage, there was nothing he could do about it. He could remember, _vividly_ the sound of something crunching under the pressure of the bite, and he wasn't excited to get to view it. He did, however, glance behind him once or twice, and was equally unsurprised and annoyed by the near river of blood trailing behind him. Hopefully, the aliens weren't some kind of space... land... spider-shark, and nothing would come for the scent of blood. The ground beneath him remained painfully uneven and hard, seemingly coated with a sea of twigs. The feel of it leaving indentations in his hands grew bothersome to the point where he loathed it, grimacing every time he had claw through it. Sweat dripped down the side of his face. With every tug forward he wanted to give up, roll onto his uninjured side and wait in the hopes that either Birdperson would find him or he'd have a relatively quick death. But he pulled forward anyway. He didn't actually want to go down in an uncomfortable sea of broken wicker chairs.

Finally, after what felt like hours of excruciatingly slow movement, the uneven floor began to slope upwards. The sliver of yellow light loomed drastically closer than before. He continued to reach forward and drag himself along until the slope was so great that his hands just slid down, at which point he began sweeping away the sticks in search of handholds.

Climbing was infinitely worse than crawling.

Every upward pull set off fireworks in his head, and he had to scrape his side along the gritty rock each time he progressed. Halfway to the entrance, his head pounded so hard that he felt his fingers loosen. He knew though that if he fell he wouldn't work up the strength to try again. He barely managed to correct his grip in time. The only blessing of the steep rock was that the majority of the fucking wicker was gone. Thank _God._

Movement vertically took twice as long as it had when crawling, and he was surprised when his fingertips _finally_ breached the continuous pattern of tiny, damp handholds. He threw up his other hand quickly, nearly accustomed to the burn of stretching out his side. That hand too touched even surface. He looked up but, thanks to the proximity of his head to the wall, could see little. He didn't have the abdominal strength at the moment to lean back and discover whether he'd reached the exit, so he inched both hands forward, scraping them against the rock. They met no resistance.

He made it. Behind him, the mess of broken twigs and corpses faded into the darkness.

With that, he steeled himself, gritted his teeth, and _heaved._ One foot scrambled at the wall, barely giving enough leverage to turn a hand on the surface to his entire forearm. In a blessed, highly unexpected stroke of luck given the days events, his other knee knocked roughly into a tiny hold. He settled on it, then pushed off, entire leg trembling, and got both arms settled on the surface. His face was above the wall now, and he could see the expanse of grey rock and sweltering purple fauna before him, all under the obnoxiously yellow sky. He squeezed his eyes shut and heaved up once more, swiveling his entire body sideways in a dangerous attempt to get one leg onto the ground. He succeeded, and let out all the tension in his mouth, a gasp of relief dissolving into pained, stunted panting. He rolled, and his whole body was finally out of the cave.

His fingers were numb as shit.

Rick laid on the ground, Entire side throbbing in time with his pounding head.

_Flare gun._

His arm, shaking feebly and pushed to the limit of its strength, reached slowly into his coat pocket for the final time and removed the gun. He aimed it up, fired, and dropped his arm. He didn't even feel it hit the ground. The last thing he saw before _blessed fucking unconsciousness_ was the sky bursting into brilliant red light, centered around him. He never wanted to see wicker furniture again.

**Author's Note:**

> wowza there we go. anyway. fuckign wicker man. idk if anyone picked up on it but theres supposed to be some humor in that rick came out of this afraid of *wicker*, some totally arbitrary substance that vaguely reminds him of the webs material, instead of, you know. spiders.
> 
> this actually took a long-ass time to write which is weird cuz its bad. sorry its so short! im planning to do a chapter on pirates sooner or later lmao. and i wont whitewash it either, the pirates are like, super rapey
> 
> thanks sm for reading!!! please feel free to talk to me or recommend shit. i think it might be really awesome to do kind of aftermath chapters?? like, please tell me whether you like that idea????? my hurt/comfort heart is just rly lookin for that rn dfbkvdbkdbk birdperson comes up to this asshole bleeding out with his entire torso a gorey mess and is like 'you appear to be dying. i will make efforts to prevent this, but can promise nothing.'


End file.
